chapter three
The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s
Seeking the Good Life on the Road
T
he relationship of socialism to the good life constitutes one of the
fundamental problems in interpreting the history of the Soviet
Union. The crash industrialization program launched in 1928 under the name
of the fi rst fi ve-year plan aspired to produce an economy of plenty but to
what end? The need for military defense certainly dominated these planning
considerations, but so did the idea that socialism rather than capitalism could
permit a poor country like the USSR to catch up to the West and to share in
the good life already enjoyed by capitalist bourgeoisies. This life emphasized
material comfort, even luxury, and ease. Socialism, believed its visionaries,
could emulate this life of comfort and make it accessible to all the people, not
only the few. But a socialist and democratic good life could also eschew mate-
rial commodities altogether and emphasize the nonmaterial pleasures of the
mind and experience, of art, friendship, and community. The experience of
Soviet tourists in the 1920s and 1930s directly contributed to an elaboration
of the meaning of Soviet socialism and its ability to construct an alternate and
superior good life.
In the beginning, as we have seen, tourism and vacations promoted a life of
useful leisure, providing an antidote to the intensity of socialist forms of pro-
duction such as shock work and socialist competition. Real proletarians needed
the benefi ts of rational leisure more than any other social group, and along with
priority access to the kurort system as proletarian repair shops, workers could
also benefi t from active vacation leisure, tourism. One should not think of tour-
ism as a gentry affair, wrote the activist Bergman in 1927: “It is a nasty habit to
think in this way: in the end, we ourselves are masters of our own lives, and it’s
time to get away from our habits of slavish self-limitation: ‘Only gentlemen can
do this,’ or ‘What can we do?’ Not true! Despite our poverty, workers can live
much better, more beautiful, and more interesting lives.”^1 Thus as chapter 2 has
shown, the Society for Proletarian Tourism and Excursions intended to put mil-
lions of factory workers into organized and self-organized travel.^2
- Bergman, Otdykh letom , 52–53.
- RGASPI, f. M-1, op. 4, d. 38 (Komsomol secretariat, 29 March 1929), l. 184; Biulleten'
(Central Council and Moscow Oblast Section of the Society for Proletarian Tourism), nos.
2–3 (1930): 24; Turist-aktivist , no. 8 (1931): 41.